Aavara PCE122 HDMI extender

The long run

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Review Ever fancied watching a Blu-ray movie in the garden? Always wondered what it would be like to isolate your Xbox 360 so you could hear the gameplay over the sound of the jet engine Microsoft calls a DVD drive? Many of us would probably like to, but 50 metre HDMI cables tend to go for £300 apiece – not exactly what you'd describe as a cost-effective arrangement.

Cable TV: Aavara's PCE122 sender and receiver units

Now the Aavara's PCE122 HDMI over coaxial extender from Keene Electronics, is not exactly a cheap alternative,but it is more flexible and allows you to send 1080p HDMI signals distances up to 120 metres using inexpensive coax cable.

On a more serious note, if you are a publican or owner of a similar public venue who relies on such things as Sky Sports to draw in customers, it's likely you had the building wired with coax twenty years ago. Now the high definition age is here and you need to connect up those shiny new HD panels, you’ll need something along the lines of the Aavara PCE122 if you want to avoid closing the pub to have it rewired. Not to mention the exorbitant cost of doing so.

With Keene flogging sender/receiver pairs for £487 and individual receiver units for £262 each, you're still going to have to dig deep, but it's the versatility that's key here. Thanks to a feature known as cascade, units can be daisy-chained with up to five receivers in each chain. Given also that the sender unit itself has two outputs, it is possible to cascade the same signal to a maximum of ten displays.

Multiple units can be linked together to form a display cascade

With each unit capable of boosting a 1080p signal 120 metres (230 metres for 720p), using a five-unit chain, it is conceivable that the final receiver could end up 600 metres away. Albeit a bit of a pain to change the disc in your Blu-Ray player at that distance though.